Friday, May 16, 2008

Reading List: Fallen Angels

I do not have the slightest idea what the authors were up to
in writing this novel. All three are award-winning writers
of “hard” science fiction, and the first two are
the most celebrated team working in that genre of all time.
I thought I'd read all of the Niven and Pournelle (and
assorted others) collaborations, but I only discovered this one
when the 2004 reprint edition was mentioned on
Jerry Pournelle's Web log.

The premise is interesting, indeed delicious: neo-Luddite
environmentalists have so crippled the U.S. economy (and presumably
that of other industrialised nations, although they do not figure
in the novel) that an incipient global cooling trend due to
solar
inactivity has tipped over into an ice age. Technologists are
actively persecuted, and the U.S. and Soviet space stations and
their crews have been marooned in orbit, left to fend for themselves
without support from Earth. (The story is set in an unspecified
future era in which the orbital habitats accommodate a substantially
larger population than space stations envisioned when the
novel was published, and have access to lunar resources.)

The earthbound technophobes, huddling in the cold and dark as the
glaciers advance, and the orbiting technophiles, watching their
meagre resources dwindle despite their cleverness, are forced to
confront one another when a “scoop ship” harvesting
nitrogen from Earth's atmosphere is shot down by a missile and
makes a crash landing on the ice cap descending on upper midwest
of the United States. The two “angels”—spacemen—are
fugitives sought by the Green enforcers, and figures of legend to
that small band of Earthlings who preserve the dream of a human
destiny in the stars.

And who would they be? Science fiction fans, of course! Sorry,
but you just lost me, right about when I almost lost my lunch. By “fans”,
we aren't talking about people like me, and probably many readers of this
chronicle, whose sense of wonder was kindled in childhood by science fiction
and who, even as adults, find it almost unique among contemporary literary
genera in being centred on ideas, and exploring “what if”
scenarios that other authors do not even imagine. No, here we're talking
about the subculture of “fandom”, a group of people, defying
parody by transcending the most outrageous attempts, who invest
much of their lives into elaborating their own private vocabulary,
writing instantly forgotten fan fiction and fanzines, snarking and sniping
at one another over incomprehensible disputes, and organising conventions
whose names seem ever so clever only to other fans, where they gather to
reinforce their behaviour. The premise here is that when the mainstream
culture goes South (literally, as the glaciers descend from the
North), “who's gonna save us?”—the fans!

I like to think that more decades of reading science fiction than
I'd like to admit to has exercised my ability to suspend
disbelief to such a degree that I'm willing to accept
just about any self-consistent premise as
the price of admission to an entertaining yarn. Heck, last week
I recommended a zombie book! But for the work of three renowned
hard science fiction writers, there are a lot of serious factual
flubs here. (Page numbers are from the mass market paperback
edition cited above.)

The
Titan II
(not “Titan Two”) uses
Aerozine 50
and
Nitrogen tetroxide
as propellants,
not RP-1 (kerosene) and LOX. One could not fuel a
Titan II with RP-1 and LOX, not only because the sizes of the
propellant tanks would be incorrect for the mixture
ratio of the propellants, but because the Titan II lacks
the ignition system for non-hypergolic propellants.
(pp. 144–145)

“Just hydrogen. But you can compress it, and
it will liquify. It is not that difficult.”. Well,
actually, it is. The
critical
point for hydrogen is 23.97° K, so regardless of how
much you compress it, you still need to refrigerate it to a
temperature less than half that of liquid nitrogen to obtain the
liquid phase. For liquid hydrogen at one atmosphere, you need
to chill it to 20.28° K. You don't just need a compressor,
you need a powerful cryostat to liquefy hydrogen.
“…letting the O2 boil off.”
Oxygen squared? Please, it's O2. (p. 290)

“…the jets were brighter than the dawn…“.
If this had been in verse, I'd have let it stand as metaphorical,
but it's descriptive prose and dead wrong. The Phoenix
is fueled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen, which burn with an
almost invisible flame. There's no way the rocket exhaust
would have been brighter than the dawn.

Now it seems to me there are three potential explanations of the
numerous lapses of this story from the grounded-in-reality
attention to detail one expects in hard science fiction.

The authors deliberately wished to mock science
fiction fans who, while able to reel off the entire credits
of 1950s B movie creature features from memory, pay little
attention to the actual history and science of the
real world, and hence they get all kinds
of details wrong while spouting off authoritatively.

The story is set is an alternative universe,
just a few forks from
the one we inhabit. Consequently, the general outline
is the same, but the little details differ. Like,
for example, science fiction fans being able to
work together to accomplish something productive.

This manuscript, which, the authors “suspect
that few books have ever been delivered this close to
a previously scheduled publication date”
(p. 451) was never subjected to the intensive
fact-checking scrutiny which the better kind of
obsessive-compulsive fan will contribute out of a sense
that even fiction must be right where it
intersects reality.

I'm not gonna fingo any
hypotheses here. If you have no interest whatsoever in
the world of science fiction fandom, you'll probably, like
me, consider this the “Worst Niven and Pournelle—Ever”.
On the other hand, if you can reel off every Worldcon from the
first Boskone to the present and pen Feghoots for the local
'zine on days you're not rehearsing with the filk band, you may
have a different estimation of this novel.